However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as “a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder”. His “half-baked theory” directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to “atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering”, the site stated.

Wowzers. Only 39% of Americans believe in evolution? What is it about education that scares so many Americans? Maybe it is just easier to believe whatever the book says – typical lazy American idiots.

I hope the movie gets released here because I want to see it. I also hope it gets released here because that would show that at least one company isn’t too scared of the nut jobs to release a simple bio pic.

In brief, the number of American non-believers has doubled since 1990, a 2008 Pew survey found, and increased even more in some other advanced democracies. What’s curious is not so much the overall decline of belief (which has caused the Vatican to lament the de-Christianization of Europe) as the pattern. In a paper last month in the online journal Evolutionary Psychology, Gregory Paul finds that countries with the lowest rates of social dysfunction—based on 25 measures, including rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, unemployment, and poverty—have become the most secular. Those with the most dysfunction, such as Portugal and the U.S., are the most religious, as measured by self-professed belief, church attendance, habits of prayer, and the like.

What is also disturbing about this is that the US is considered a country with more dysfunction.

In a resolution adopted on a 125-to-4 vote by the APA’s governing council, and in a comprehensive report based on two years of research, the 150,000-member association put itself firmly on record in opposition of so-called “reparative therapy” which seeks to change sexual orientation.

No solid evidence exists that such change is likely, says the report, and some research suggests that efforts to produce change could be harmful, inducing depression and suicidal tendencies.

Some validation for something I could have told you years ago. I heard a rumor that you can’t get the black out of people either. What is this world coming to?

A recent Rasmussen poll of likely voters found that 75% of respondents in Arkansas and Alabama think the Bible is literally true. West Virginia came in at 70% and Tennessee at 68%.

In Vermont and Massachusetts evidently only 22% are complete whack-jobs.

I would like to think that these numbers only reflect the amount of people who regularly misuse (and therefore have forgotten the definition of) the word ‘literally’. Maybe when asked if they think the Bible is literally true they thought it was being used in the same way as when I say I’m going to literally kill myself because so many Americans are sheep (and stupid sheep at that).

Salon has a great piece about the somewhat more than sketchy health articles on the Huffington Post.

I get a lot of news from the Huffington Post. It is even my homepage on my computer. But I’ve also learned never to venture into the “Living” section – as it is full of almost nothing but metaphysical homeopathic bullshit.

While I admit that the drug companies have too much pull over health-care in this country, I also know that they are not ones to turn down a profit. The drug companies are not engaged in a conspiracy in which they convince the American people that only their drugs work for any given illness. If drinking wormwood tea made cancer go away they wouldn’t try to cover it up, they would try to sell it.

I often hear people say we just need to give homeopathy a chance – that we are too biased to traditional western medicine. What they don’t understand is that we did give alternative treatments a chance. We gave all treatments a chance, and those that worked became medicine and those that didn’t became “alternative medicine”.

The scientific method applies the same to western medicine as it applies to gravity or to the nature of matter. Just because you want Aloe Vera Gel to cure your arthritis doesn’t mean it will. Either accept everything that the scientific method gives us or accept none of it. If you pick and choose than you undermine it’s very usefulness as a system.

The government is spending an increasing amount of money by investigating the legitimacy of so-called alternative medicine. And so far all they’ve found is that they are simply an alternative to effective. And yet they through more money down the well.

Like the family that was recently held responsible for the death of their child (for not taking her to the hospital in lieu of prayer) people put themselves and others at risk when they turn away from western medicine.

Our culture’s growing appetite for natural and organic foods cannot be allowed to spread to far. Soon there will be a movement against penicillin and the very plastic that makes the syringes that carry it.

Our intellects enable us to create things from other things – it is why we’re on the top of the food chain, it is what makes us human. Homeopathy is a move away from progress, from evolution. It is a move to simpler times, with simple remedies, simple sickness, and simple death.

My father died in 2007 and my brother has started going through some of the seemingly endless boxes that my father had had in storage. Aside from showing me that he was not the straight A student he claimed to be, this report card from Valpo University sheds some light on other, darker subjects. Perhaps the reason why I’m an atheist today is because my father evidently got a D in “Christian Traditions 3”. Bravo old man, bravo. This is the same man who signed off on my pledges to be a good christian in my cub scout book.